MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- Ten years have passed since LaQuanta Riley was last seen by family members. Her mother’s plea for answers is as urgent as ever.

Pam Riley said she will believe her daughter is alive “until God allows me to know something different." She is also questioning whether Montgomery police thoroughly investigated the case.

LaQuanta was 19 and moving out of an apartment in Eufaula where she’d been living with a high school friend until an apparent disagreement, her mother said. LaQuanta planned to head back to Montgomery to live with her great-aunt, Katie Smith.

Family members last saw LaQuanta on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2003, when she came over to her mother’s house. She left late that night with a man driving a green car.

A few days later, Riley says she received a voicemail message from LaQuanta at her home.

LaQuanta was upset and could be heard crying on the message, but Riley could never determine what her daughter was saying. A man’s voice was also heard on the message.

“I can imagine her, some kind of way, getting to a phone – now she gets panicking,” Riley said. “It was like she was saying, ‘Leave me alone,’ or maybe she wanted to go home.”

Riley said she listened to the message repeatedly until a power outage erased it.

Riley said she notified police of the message and two detectives made an audio recording of it.

Then-Montgomery Police Detective M. Dante Gordon worked LaQuanta’s case for about two years beginning in around 2005. He said he heard of the voicemail, but it wasn’t provided to him.

Gordon, who now serves with the U.S. Marshals Service in Montgomery, described the case as “strange” because he said police never received any real leads to LaQuanta’s whereabouts.

“It is different,” Gordon said. “It’s been this long and no leads on it. No one knows anything and no one is talking to us about it.”

Gordon said it’s a mystery, and one he would like to see solved.

Detectives followed up on every piece of information that Riley provided to them, Gordon said. They attempted to interview everyone LaQuanta knew at the time.

“No one wanted to talk to us,” he said, of LaQuanta’s acquaintances. “No one wanted to cooperate with us.

“It was a missing person case,” Gordon continued. “It wasn’t a criminal case. We couldn’t make anyone talk to us.”

Gordon said it wasn’t ever clear to investigators whether LaQuanta made it back to Montgomery after asking family members to pick her up in Eufaula.

Riley said about two days before LaQuanta disappeared her daughter went to Eufaula for the weekend to collect some of her belongings as she planned to move out of her apartment.

That same day, LaQuanta called from Eufaula upset and asked her mother to pick her up. She wasn’t able to, but Riley says someone else picked her up.

“I never asked her what happened in Eufaula,” Riley said, adding that she didn’t want to pry. “That is my one regret.”

At some point in the investigation, according to Riley, police learned that someone rented an apartment in Stone Mountain, Ga., in LaQuanta’s name.

Gordon confirmed that there was a match for that name in a database, but he didn’t know if it was someone actually using LaQuanta’s identity.

Riley visited the apartment, she said. A man who answered the door told her he had lived there for two years.

After Riley showed the man a picture of her daughter, he claimed LaQuanta had lived in an apartment down the hall from him until just a couple of days before. She had been in a fight and asked to use his phone.

“I can’t fathom her being there,” Riley said.

Gordon was just one of many detectives who worked the case over the years. He said that the detectives followed up on every piece of information provided to them.

Detectives, for example, received tips that LaQuanta was killed and buried. An inmate, whose name Gordon didn’t remember, told police he witnessed LaQuanta being killed and tossed into Cooter’s Pond in Prattville. Later, the man changed his story and said he made up parts of it.

“We looked into all of that,” Gordon said.

When asked how she deals with not knowing what happened to her daughter, Riley said she trusts in God and prays.

“I told God the week that LaQuanta went missing that he had to get me through this,” she said.

Montgomery police public information officer Lt. Regina Duckett said LaQuanta’s case remains open and was assigned to a new detective in the last month.

She said there is no new information, and declined AL.com’s request to speak to a detective who worked the case.